1. Brother Juniper’s friend, the master at the University of San Martín, is bitterly convinced that “all was wrong with the world” (111) because his wife ran away to follow a soldier leaving him with two children. He does not believe in a “guided world” (112). He tells the story of a Queen whose entire people prayed that she should recover from a cancer, but she did not. He also tells of having researched the glowing epitaph of a woman on a tomb in Lima Cathedral in order to prove that those who cut the inscription in stone were lying about her goodness. He is convinced that “‘in the world we do nothing but feed our wills’” (114), and that selflessness and disinterestedness are merely myths or worse lies. However, having researched the woman’s life, he found the epitaph to be fully justified. This amazes him, but he will not accept that such goodness can exist on earth and concludes that “‘what I said was true. The woman was an exception, perhaps an exception’” (114).
2. Brother Juniper’s comparison of the victims and the survivors of an epidemic prove that “the dead were five times more worth saving [than those who lived]” (113). Thus, the facts do not support faith, so he destroys the data because it causes “a resignation that he did not permit his reason to examine” (113).
3. Madre María comes to understand “it was enough to work ... [that] it seemed sufficient for Heaven that for a while in Peru a disinterested love had flowered and faded” (117). That is, she is reconciled to the impermanence of life. She learns that she has not really allowed herself to show her love because she has been too concerned with her legacy.
Camila Perichole learns to express the love she felt for Uncle Pio and her son Don Jamie. Her “long despair ... found its rest on that dusty friendly lap [of Madre María]” (120).
Doña Carla, the Condessa d’Abuirre, learns to express her love for her mother Doña María of whom she makes “a long passionate defense” (121). She will help the Abbess with her work for they both now know, “‘anywhere you may expect grace’” (121).
Above all, each of them (even Captain Alvarado) knows that life is short, but that it is enough, “soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten but that love will have been enough ...” (123).
4. Having spent the whole of the novel tracing Brother Juniper’s conclusions that the fall of the bridge killed people just at the moment when they were about to begin a new life and that therefore it illustrates that we live in a directionless universe, the narrator now raises the possibility that good came of it. We are asked, “where are sufficient books to contain the events that would not have been the same without the fall of the bridge?” (120). The novel does not answer the question which Brother Juniper set out to answer: it leaves us with an ambiguous ‘perhaps.’
Given that we cannot know if there is a God, the narrator suggests that we should base our lives on something that we do know to exist: love. Love is the only thing that gives positive meaning; it is the only thing that we know survives death. That it does not do so for very long (because time wipes away every memory) does not negate its truth and power.
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